I
We think of the first eight or ten centuries of the Christian era as a chasm between the ancient and the modern. But this is of course not strictly true, least of all in folk-music. In the church, indeed, music struggled slowly and painfully, surrounded by doctrine and law. But in the music, as in the customs, of the people, there was no break. The apostolic succession of song continued unbroken from the time of the Greeks to the time of Schubert. Through all the mediæval period folk-music was flourishing, growing in richness and in influence steadily up to the time when it entered art music by the back door, so to speak, stealing into the Catholic ritual. For many centuries the songs of the old world continued in the new. For the Christian era did not come all at once. It attained formal dominance when Constantine adopted it as the official religion of Rome. But it needed many centuries more before it could attain complete sway over people’s hearts. Pagan customs and pagan songs were still living and beautiful. The Christian missionaries gained their hold over the people by compromising with the past. The old festivals were not rejected in favor of the new; they were merged with the new. Thus Christmas, among the Germanic nations, was made to absorb an older festival of the turning of the sun, and the mistletoe, which had had a profound religious significance for the Pagans became one of the minor symbols of the Christian feast and continues to-day an essential part of the Yuletide festivities, as we know.
And thus it was with the people’s songs. Men’s beliefs were Christianized, but men’s feelings remained Pagan. And the two existed side by side for centuries without trouble. Charlemagne ordered a collection to be made of German songs (all of Pagan origin) and did not feel that there was anything impious in his action. The Pagan was honored along with the Christian just as, some five centuries later, the Classical was honored in the Renaissance. But the millennial year was approaching, when men expected the world to end, or Christ to come and take personal charge of his Kingdom. And throughout all Christendom there arose a desire in men to make themselves perfect for the second coming. And so arose a mania for exterminating all that remained of the old world. Charlemagne’s son, Ludwig the Pious, despised the German songs his father had collected. And it was so all over Europe. In these years the last vestiges of Paganism were stamped out, except for the sweet souvenirs of it which the institution of the mistletoe and similar symbols have retained.
Pagan songs of the early Christian period were mostly in the hands of wandering minstrels and storytellers who roamed the world in great numbers. These men, like the songs they sang, were direct descendants of the Pagan world. One well accredited theory says that the Italian minstrels were the gladiators of Roman times, and their descendants. The last of the Roman gladiatorial shows was held about the beginning of the fifth century. After that Christian sentiment forbade these bloody entertainments, and the gladiators, the entertainers par excellence of Roman times, found themselves without a means of livelihood. They wandered from town to town, giving exhibitions of strength and agility in the market places, just as the acrobats do to this day in European cities. They became a separate caste, almost a separate race. Inevitably they invented or appropriated songs with which to entertain their admirers between the acts. Some of them became itinerant merchants, selling molasses or some other delicacy and attracting the crowds by their music. Sometimes they had dancing bears, or camels, or trick monkeys.
In the more serious northern countries—Germany and England—they were probably the remnants of the old priesthood. Religion has always needed music as a support, and the old priests were themselves bards, or had bards in their service to sing their doctrines. As they fell into disrepute with the advance of Christianity, they had to seek their living as best they might, and they became minstrels, singing the old sagas and stories which people still loved. Often they became attached to the service of the courts. The chronicler Robert Ware says that the battle of Hastings, in which William the Conqueror subjected the Saxons, was opened by the minstrel or jongleur Taillefer, attached to the Norman army, who advanced singing of the fabulous exploits of some hero of the time and performing feats of agility with his lance and sword, which struck terror into the Saxons, who thought his dexterity must be the effect of witchcraft. But more often the minstrels were popular entertainers, with a collection of tricks—hence the name of jongleur, which means player or trickster, and gives us our English word ‘juggler.’
Their music had no very exalted status, since it was only a ‘side-line’ to their merchandise or performance. But to the people of the time it was as important as our orchestral concerts and operas are to us. For it effected the interchange of art and ideas between province and province and between nation and nation. The minstrels were rarely the inventors of the songs they sang. The music of the time was genuine folk-music and the minstrels only learned and disseminated the popular songs. But they represented the whole institution of secular music in the early Christian age.
In their roving life, the minstrels tended to become wretchedly immoral. They sometimes formed themselves into bands for the acting of plays, taking women along with them, and these bands became the synonym for dissolute living. Sometimes they were beggars pure and simple, willing to get money by any means except working, and purchasable equally to spread a scandal or commit a murder. They had no home and no citizenship. In 554 A. D. Childebert promulgated very stringent laws for the suppression of their licentiousness. Philip Augustus, King of France, caused them to be expelled from his domains. They were outside the law and its protection. For centuries they were regarded as the evil children of another race. A citizen might attack or insult a minstrel and the latter had no recourse in law, except the privilege of striking his opponent’s shadow. This outlawing of musicians continued (in the statute books, at least) for many years. There are traces of it still in certain lands. Even New York state, it is said, has an unrepealed statute somewhere in its dusty books authorizing the arrest of ‘common showmen.’
This prejudice, in the early years, seems to have been generally justified. The lives of the minstrels were certainly dissolute. Their personal characters had all the unattractive qualities of an inferior race—to dying for money or favor, fickleness and vindictiveness. They had to truckle to the great, and flatter the prejudices of the masses. They had, moreover, the means of making themselves feared by the knights and barons of whom they demanded money in return for their music. For if they were allowed to leave the castle disgruntled, nothing was easier for them than to spread abroad among the people scandals concerning the great men and ladies, the tale that Sir Knight was a wife-beater and that his lady was having an affair with her page. A certain jongleur, Colin Muset, who plied his trade in Lorraine and Champagne in the thirteenth century, once had occasion to sing the following ditty to the noble of whom he had asked largess:
‘Lord Count, I have the viol played
Before yourself, within your hall,
And you my service never paid
Nor gave me any wage at all;
’Twas villainy.’
It is not difficult to catch the implied threat in these lines.
But the fickleness and flunkeyism of the minstrels served them well. When they had been expelled from France because of their libellous tongues, many of them were invited over to England by William de Longchamps, bishop of Ely, who governed the kingdom during the absence of Richard the Lionhearted, and who, anxious to blind the people to the vices of his régime, hired these singers to proclaim his virtues to the public. Thus art is continually being called to the glorification of vice and tyranny. But for such services the minstrels had their reward. So useful did they make themselves, wherever they went, that they received increasing marks of respect. When the Christian revival of the tenth and eleventh centuries came, they made themselves its apostles, singing the new songs in place of the old. The acting troupes presented miracle plays on Biblical or traditional religious subjects and were presently invited by the clergy to perform on the church steps or even within the church itself. Centuries later they had attained such dignity that they could organize themselves into guilds under the protection of the reigning prince. They had their aristocratic and exclusive labor unions, were employed to organize town bands, and in many places formed the nuclei for court orchestras.
Of the music of these minstrels in the early centuries we know next to nothing. There existed nothing at the time that could be called musical notation, and tradition, if it has brought any of their songs down to us, has changed them in the course of the centuries. We have, it is true, a spirited song, supposed to have been written on the death of Charlemagne, calling on Franks and Romans to lament and honor the lost sovereign. But this was probably not purely popular in its origin, else it would not have attained to writing. The words of a few ditties have been preserved. The celebrated ‘Song of Roland,’ dating from Charlemagne’s time, was supposed to have been sung as late as the battle of Poitiers in 1356. But what chiefly assures us of the vigor of the popular music of the time was the wide variety of types it contained—patriotic songs, love songs, songs satirical and historical, and many others. We know also that the music was original and alive, quite in contrast to that of the church. For when the popular tradition was taken up by the aristocratic Troubadours and Trouvères in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the melodies had an independent character that proves a vigorous antecedent development. The old modes continued to dominate church music up to the fifteenth and even sixteenth centuries. But the songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères are often written in the modern major scale. The popular music of the ninth and tenth centuries had undergone the development that the church did not attain until five hundred years later.
We know rather more concerning the instruments used by the wandering minstrels. They were of all the types which have since furnished out the modern orchestra. The harp, a remnant of the very earliest times, was favored by the more aristocratic musicians and steadily became enlarged as the technique of music widened. The lute (much like the modern guitar), most popular of amateur instruments in the time of the Renaissance, was widely used. All kinds of pipes, ancestors of the wood-wind instruments of our orchestras, flourished in a great variety of styles. And the incipient violin was represented by the rota, rebek, and vielle, figuring under a multitude of different names. Like the Saxon language during the Norman domination in England, popular music developed in the dark, without official sanction, finally coming forth, strong and mature, from its hiding and carrying everything before it.